Friday, 19 May 2017

Friday Is Rock'n'Roll #London Day: Alice In Rock'n'Roll Wonderland

Friday is Rock'n'Roll London Day! Join the Rock'n'Roll London walk this (and every Friday) afternoon at 2:00p.m meeting at Tottenham Court Road Station

Adam writes…

Just back from the
Pink Floyd exhibition Their Mortal Remains at the V&A - an absolutely
thrilling show.

I'm looking forward to
sharing my Top 10 highlights in a later post - difficulty is where to start
with such a fireworks display of a exhibition. From the moment you enter to the
great surround-sound crescendo of Comfortably Numb from the reunion performance
at Live 8 at the finale, it is a constantly riveting and revealing experience.

Right at the start of
the show we are invited to pop down the rabbit hole…

… an allusion, of
course, to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, one of the seminal texts of psychedelia.

At the V&A we are
treated to some footage from Jonathan Miller's 1966 BBC production of Alice…

Miller's version was
broadcast at Christmastime 1966 and dispensed with the animal-head costumes hitherto associated with the piece, a
move considered radical at the time. He was aiming to capture some of what he
felt was the essence of the story – a child's perspective on a grown-up world
where adults run about doing confusing and seemingly pointless things.

The back-to-childhood
theme was very much in the creative ether of the day - no surprise given that
the artistic protagonsists of the time had all had their childhood interrupted
– if not obliterated – by war. This last is a theme that comes up
again-and-again in the work of Pink Floyd's Roger Waters.

Many of its
illustrious creative team invloved in Miller's BBC Alice have associations with
the pop and rock music scene of the period. Leo McKern dragged-up as the Ugly
Duchess, having played Clang in Help! a year earlier…

McKern also starred in
cult TV show The Prisoner, in which The Fabs also make a small sonic cameo…

Peter Cook as the Mad
Hatter (who else?) had Lennon as a guest in a famous sketch in his Not Only But
Also TV show with Dudley Moore…

It is said that a young Eric Idle makes an
early, uncredited TV appearance in the Alice production. He went on, of course, to
become a member of the Pre-Fab
Four…

Peter Sellers played
The King of Hearts and famously "covered" a fabs classic as Richard
III…

The soundtrack for the
production was by Ravi Shankar, George Harrison's sitar guru…

In a further Pink
Floyd connection, there's a theory out there on the internet (!) that suggests
Floyd's The Wall synchronises perfectly with the Disney animated version of
Alice. You gotta love the internet.

The rabbit hole sent
me home from the V&A to dig around in the more arcane corners of my record
collection to retrieve this relic…

It's a recording of Jane Asher playing the
role of Alice in 1958 - a reminder that she had a theatrical career of her own
long before she ever met that Paul McCartney!

But perhaps the most
famous of all Rock'n'Roll Alice in Wonderland references is from Jefferson
Airplane and their 1967 classic White Rabbit…

Here's the trailer for the Rock'n'Roll London Walk which meets at 2pm Tottenham Court Road station every Friday.

The Rock'n'Roll London walk is ONLY London Walk with its own dedicated comic book! Written by Rock'n'Roll London guide (and Daily Constitutional editor Adam) you can download at the London Bookstore online: londonbookstore.myshopify.com

A
London Walk costs £10 – £8 concession. To join a London Walk, simply meet your
guide at the designated tube station at the appointed time. Details of all
London Walks can be found at www.walks.com.